Archive for August, 2012

There has been some confusion regarding the interpretation of the “Influence” action. I will try to clarify this below.

Apparently there has been a small change in the rules. In the first edition of the rulebook it says:

By selecting the Influence action, you may move up to two Influence Discs. These moves may be:

• from your Influence Track or from a hex where you have an Influence Disc to a hex that does not contain an Influence

Disc or an enemy Ship and is adjacent to a hex where you have a disc or a Ship.

• From a hex where you have an Influence Disc back to your Influence Track.

Hence, following these rules you are not allowed to place an influence disc on a hex you occupy with a ship if it is not adjacent to a hex with one of your influence discs/ships. However, in the 2nd edition of the rulebook it says:

By selecting the Influence action, you may move up to two Influence Discs. These moves may be:

• from your Influence Track, or from a hex where you have an Influence Disc to a hex that does not contain an Influence Disc or an enemy Ship and is adjacent to a hex where you have a discor a Ship, or to a hex where only you have a Ship, or back to your Influence Track.

So following the most up-to-date rule a player may influence a hex he/she has a ship on even though it is not adjacent to any other hex he/she occupies (with either a ship or influence disc).

The rules also state that: The hex Influenced has to have a Wormhole connection to the hex where you have a disc or a Ship.

This could be misinterpreted to overrule the conclusion above. However, the sentence “the hex where you have a disc or a ship” is referring back to the same hex mentioned at the beginning of the sentence, not a new hex. Thus, the rule is still valid.

So in theory you could fly past enemy territory (possibly leaving some ships pinned), stop on an “abandoned” hex, influence it and at the same time influence an adjacent hex that is connected to it with a wormhole.

One last note, remember that you can also place an influence disc after combat even though there are no friendly adjacent hexes (provided that you have destroyed all enemy ships and populations). This influence disc must come from the influence track as opposed to the “influence” action where you can retrieve it from another hex.

After several months of dedication to Lords of Waterdeep and Puerto Rico – two ridiculously fun games by the way – we finally got around to playing Eclipse – New dawn for the galaxy. My incessant babbling about this game to my friends may have put the expectation-bar a bit high so I was very excited to see if it lived up to all the hype.

Before I write any further I should mention that this review could be severely biased by our group’s tendency to love heavy, cutthroat, territory-holding games mixed with euro-style strategy and resource management. Eclipse was able to provide us with all this and more….

Rules

Even though the rulebook is 32 pages long it is not a difficult game to learn. I used about 15 minutes for the introduction and the rest of the rules followed as we played. It seemed as if people caught up on the rules pretty fast and I reckon there will be no problems for our next session.

How the game played

I guess this first session was a textbook example of how NOT to play Eclipse. Being three players we picked the alien species: Planta, Orion Hegemony, and Hydran Progress. At the beginning we played pretty randomly and seemed to had lost focus on the race’s special abilities. Instead of expanding like a true weed, Planta used all his resources on building an armada in fear of a Hegemony attack that never came. Hegemony started out good and was able to establish a large and strong fleet but in the end he never got to use it on his opponents (ironically he won the game with 6 VPs). The Hydrans minded their own business but were not, for some reason, capable of researching enough technologies (most likely due to economic reasons).

So in retrospect it is easy to see that it is essential to have a plan from the beginning and, of course, exploit the race’s special abilities to the fullest. Playing Planta again I would definitely expand outwards and at the same time try to close the boarders to my opponents. Hegemony should gather sufficient VPs through war, either against ancients or more profitably the other races. The Hydrans should primarily focus on technologies in order to gather as many VPs as possible and maybe also wage war with its upgraded ships.

Strategies

From our first session there is definitely room for improvements. Here are some of the tactics I would try to implement in my following games:

At the start of the game decide which approach you want to take, i.e. war, technology, expanding, etc.

Focus and exploit the race’s special abilities.

Expand outwards and build monoliths in protected areas in the last rounds.

Build orbits if you lack a certain resource.

If you do not want war try to close of the boarders fronting your enemies, thereby you force your opponents to research the expensive Wormhole Gener if they really want to get you (if you are lucky they may pick the other opponents instead).

What do we think?

BEST GAME EVER. We all loved it. It had all the aspects we love in a board game: strategy, war, resource management, nice board, clever mechanics, I could go on. Personally I love the game mechanic with the influence discs and population cubes. Also the modular board is ingenious especially the detail with the wormholes. The fact that you can change and upgrade your ships is also a very cool mechanic. All in all this is one of the greatest games I have played and I can certainly recommend it to any serious board gamer that like heavy sci-fi games that are deep on the strategy and love in your face action.